Another Ex-boyfriend Story

My ex-boyfriend Pat's father died when Pat was twenty-two. They hadn't spoken in several years. His relationship with his mother was strained by this, though with her he kept in touch by telephone. Not often, but enough. Still, she was his mother, and the night his father died, even though he hadn't spoken to her for months, not even over Christmas, he could tell from her voice even before she uttered the words.

He hung up his phone and looked at his roommate Steve. Steve was sitting on the sofa reading an album jacket (B.B. King, as I recall--) and Steve said, "What is it, man?"

Pat's stricken expression told him everything he needed to know. "I'll get the car," Steve said. "I'll drive you home."

It was January, and they drove for two days through endless snow and blistering, bewildering cold to get to Pat's home town in time for the funeral. Pat did a lot of crying in the car, and Steve did a lot of not saying anything, the good kind of not saying anything, where you know the other person knows there's simply nothing they could say.

The funeral was going to be in the morning. Pat didn't want to go to the church part, but he knew the graveyard where his parents had plots. When he was a boy, his mother had pointed the cemetery out to him as they'd driven past.

"Someday, your father and I will be in there," she'd told him. "It would be nice if you'd stop by once in a while."

It was still early when they pulled into town. There were a couple of hours before the funeral time. Steve suggested breakfast, but Pat didn't feel like eating. He asked Steve to drop him off at the cemetery. He wanted some time to himself after the long drive, before being welcomed back to the bosom of his estranged family.

He hadn't been back in years, but he remembered how to get to the cemetery. Steve let him out at the gates. They'd agreed Steve would meet him back later, when the funeral was happening.

The cemetery was set on a hill. A winding road plowed through the snow, circling through the gravestones. Near the top of the hill, a lone grave had been dug, solemnly awaiting a new arrival. The dirt looked odd, turned inside out, sitting on top of the snow.

Pat climbed the hill and waited for the procession to arrive. The cold somehow emphasised the desolation of the scene.

He looked in the empty grave, imagining that soon his father would be in there for the rest of time. It was hard to put the man in that spot, and hard to imagine that he would stay in one place. He couldn't imagine his father tolerating that sort of impertinence, pictured him rising up out of his coffin to yell at Pat for somehow orchestrating this eternal insult. Pat of course had nothing to do with it. But that had never stopped his father's ire before.

It was overwhelming, the confusion of feelings tumbling around like socks in a dryer. Loss, and love, and anger. The guilt of being a disappointment, the outrage at having done nothing to deserve that designation.

Nearby, there was a tree. Pat walked over and leaned against it, burying his face in his arms and wailing to the open sky.

"Why?!" he yelled to the invisible ghost of his father. "Why did you have to be such an asshole and then die before I could figure out how to like you anyway?!"

It was freezing cold and his nose ran and the tears stung his face, but he wept and railed, railed and wept. His father had been a stern man, a dentist always finding fault with his only son, drilling away at Pat's self-esteem as if it was some form of decay that needed to be removed and filled with some device of his own, better design.

(Forgive the appalling conceit. I heard a lot about the Dentist in the course of my relationship with Pat.)

Finally, after the hours of fury and desolation, when his feet were solidly frozen and his teeth decidedly chattering, a hearse appeared on the road beneath. Behind it trailed the cars of the funeral parade. Slowly they mounted the hill, parking near the grave. And one by one people emerged from vehicles, talking in the hushed voices of the living in the presence of the dead, or golfers at the putting green.

Pat had not been home in many years. And when he had lived in this town, amongst the people who were his kin, he'd never quite fit in, always feeling like the odd man out. As his family members walked towards the grave, he felt no tie to any of them. They looked like strangers. No one even looked at him, acknowledging his presence. He was an outcast even at this funeral, and he felt it sorely.

And then he looked again at the crowd, and realized that in fact, he didn't know any of these people. He had never seen them before in his life. He was at the wrong funeral.

Eventually Steve arrived and picked him up. He'd brought an Egg McMuffin, which Pat ate as they drove to his parents' house. There, they found the tribe assembled over a post-funeral brunch, where neckties were incrementally loosened as the tone of conversation lightened up.

"Well, where the hell were you?" Pat's mother asked as he and Steve opened the back door and stomped the snow off their shoes. "I thought you were going to try to make it for the funeral."

It turned out that years before, his parents had sold the plots in the cemetery his mother had pointed out. They'd bought other ones in a graveyard across town. Nobody'd thought to mention this to Pat.

"So even in death, I disappointed him," Pat told me sadly, shaking his head.

"But you didn't have all the information," I reasoned. "How could you have known?"

"It wouldn't have mattered. To Dad, it would still have been my fault."

Ah, Pat.

He was a beautiful man. He looked like he'd stepped out of a Frederic Leighton painting of a knight. Chiseled cheekbones and long dark lashes, tall and effortlessly muscular. And he had a sad, dry wit that appealed to me, although at the end of the day I would have had to kill him if I'd stayed with him any longer than I did. I'd meant to break up with him for months, but every time I saw him, thinking, "This is the day I'll tell him"-- his beauty would stop me in my tracks.

And there's something beautiful in this story, I think. The innocence of hope-- the wish that we can somehow fix things that may nevertheless forever remain broken.

But God, there's just something so damn funny about this story too. I can't put my finger on what it is, but if you need me to point it out, you'd never understand anyway.